Mango Pudding Blues 3.0

A NEW SARONG

What a guy like me needs is a new sarong. I’m going sarong shopping. I have several events coming up in the next three months that will require a sarong. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

Yup.

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Tuesday, January 21, 2003

THE COMING MANGOVISION ARCHIVE

One of these days we’ll put up an archive of the old photos that have appeared at the right, here, in case someone is dying to look at one that has come and gone. It’s not a lot of work, but we’re pretty lazy. And let’s face it, you don’t really care, do you?

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Monday, January 20, 2003

THE GREAT POLYPHONY OF THE RENAISSANCE

And now this; Deo Gratias (6:02 6.9mb) by Johannes Ockeghem, from a CD entitled Utopia Triumphans: The Great Polyphony of the Renaissance by some people called the Huelgas Ensemble as led by Paul Van Nevel. It’s the cold rock shit.

And the reason that we at Mango Pudding Blues are bustin’ a move to the Great Polyphony of the Renaissance is that Killer brought it home to give a closer listen to a rockin’ little number called Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis, which is on the same cd. That song is the one deployed by Albertan artist Janet Cardiff in her piece Forty Part Motet, in which she has individually recorded each of the forty singers and plays them back through forty speakers arranged in a circle on posts that put them at eye level. The result is that you can walk right into and around and through the song in a way that is completely new.

Forty Part Motet has been re-installed (now with free admission!) at the National Gallery of Canada, and you are a fool if you live anywhere nearby and don’t go take it in. The effect is greatly enhanced by the setting, too. The Gallery itself is a wonderfully modern hulk of glass and concrete by Mango Pudding Blues’ favorite architect, Moshe Safdie (Montreal’s Habitat, Vancouver Public Library), but the room Forty Part Motet is in is the full interior of an old Ottawa church. The church got demolished, but not before they somehow took every stick of the interior (floors and walls and ceilings and beams and furniture; everything) and painstakingly rebuilt it in the gallery. It’s a time machine.

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